MightyMouse

Adding to a loser is a bad idea if it is random. Adding to a position in an instrument that is time wasting or is subject to cyclical supply and demand forces is not a good idea either. Adding to a stock index position when it is lower than your entry has worked very well if one can hold for a long period of time. The strategy has worked and has paid very well for the last 80 years. Day trading an index and wanting to be out in at most a few days will lead to severe bleeding if one adds to a loser.

Losses should be painless. So, in a leveraged position, I prefer to chop it quickly when I am wrong; probably as you say above. However, in a longer term trade where I enter with a small, mindless position to open, then I have much bigger stops since the loss doesn't matter to me.

Mystic, I think it is gay that you pose that question on a trading site.

Onesmith, You have an image of what the mindset of a trader should be and it seems that being prone to emotional outbursts does not fit with your image. That is fine. I do want to change your mind. Consider that your image may not be exactly accurate of what a trader ought to be like. Your diagnosis seems like you are 1-2 years off from being able to prescribe medication for related symptoms. You have been around long enough. Sit back and enjoy. MM

Rande, Maybe you would like to volunteer to be the example. I think those operations are covered by health insurance so your out of pocket to provide us the information would be minimal. MM

Onesmith, It is completely possible to have emotional outbursts and trade successfully.

Blue, Bernanke did not make central bank purchases in the market. He did buy treasuries and MBS which had the hopeful impact of forcing money into the markets, which would increase the equity of publicly traded companies, which would allow them to borrow more at lower rates to invest in plants and factories. My Bernanke market support statement is a matter of speaking. I am brilliant when I have a winning trade.The market went in the wrong direction when I lose.I am not a level headed zen master who is indifferent to wins or losses. I wouldn't do anything that I didn't get a charge from. The truth is that I have a healthy respect for the elements that are not in my control. Luck is one of them.

Silver and gold are not supported by Bernanke.

Every so often a blind squirrel stumbles upon a nut. In your case, you had no idea what you were doing and Bernanke provided a floor ( which he continues to provide) in the S&P. so you have been lucky. I am going to guess that you have no strategy to add when it goes in your favor, but are perfectly willing to add when you are losing. If so, then you are playing a very dangerous game even though you haven't lost yet.

We can safely call the recent activity in gold either a pull back in an uptrend or the beginning of a down trend or just range based activity. Personally, I feel gold has been overbought for a very long time. There are more longs in gold than there is gold to go around. Price has not risen with all the recent gold buying. This tells me that all the buying was done by weak buyers who bought the top. They bought from either lucky sellers or smart sellers. Take your pick. I want to be short against weak longs who will piss their pants as price goes against them. Whenever anything gets oversubscribed, price levels become unsustainable. Housing, for example, had more homes than homeowners and we are still working through that inventory that was built up from false demand in the early 2000's. I am completely comfortable thinking that we will see $400-$600 gold before we see $1700 again. We can certainly overshoot that and hit much lower prices. $400-$600 is just a guess.

I can see random orders being placed and pulled, but it is hard for me to understand why a firm would place random executions unless that firm controlled the bulk of the order flow of that instrument or was part of group of market makers who together controlled the market place. Otherwise, I don't see it and would like to know how or why they would do it.

Are they really doing this or is this just a possibility that someone thought of?

Was that when they reported earnings with the stock at +- $75 and guidance was off by about 10 cents?

What is doo doo? 700 points? 900 points? Is it 60-150 points? The market needs much greater retail representation in order to have a drop that we can call doo doo; otherwise, it is just a fart in the wind.

A record of randomly generated price and volume points can from time to time appear to be non-random. It would appear to be non-random when it mimics a market generated record of a similarly priced instrument. On the other hand, a market generated record of price and volume, occasionally, but only rarely, appears to be randomly generated. A methodology which trades only random behavior will lose more often than the methodology which exploits non-random behavior if both the former and latter are true.

Did you actually lose money trading or did you get eaten alive by your transaction costs? Big, big, difference. You may be deciding to quit as a winning trader who over traded.

Cool clip! How would creativity help in trading?

I think this might be off topic but for some strange reason, all I can think of is "Must catch moose and squirrel."

It is horrible and humbling when your parents are reduced to dependent children.

Oh, no. That was Spider who got shot in the foot. He was a different bartender. It's scary when we are supposed to make sense of things that don't make sense. Soon we will be questioning known gravitational properties.

The bartender got a hundred just for keeping the ice cubes cold.

I don't believe in Forex. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, "I have pairs; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment, we can make fifty thousand trading." So they can't resist. I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable. [slamming hand on the table and pointing] I don't want Forex near schools! I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the Europeans, the Greeks or the Cypriots. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.

Oil spikes, and there is slippage, but I have never experienced more than 8-10 ticks even during the volatile days of the arab spring (good times). Silver got me good for about 15 ticks and that was the last time I traded it. I don't know if there are bigger in silver. F silver. The spikes you see do have bids and offers occurring so you won't find yourself without a bid or offer in 50 to 100 ticks of either. Is that what you mean?

Imagine how well he would have done if he spent $40k or $80K like he hopes you will.

Thales, Personally, I am okay with seeing consistent gains on a daily and weekly basis. It is an excellent example of the ideal traitor and a perfect record of reality. I might decide to post my chart with respect on the y axis and time on the x axis, measuring my respect for Mr. Black over time. The function is 1/x for all positive x. Color asymptotic opinion as hopelessly optimistic since my respect never reaches zero for Mr. Black. MM